Is Sadness better than Disappointment?

The following Video Blog contains the written blog below plus my random thoughts;

I saw a familiar ad online which read;

“Feeling depressed and nothing has worked? Take part in this clinical study. Possible compensation.”

Now having had a lot of experience with Depression, I can tell you the phrasing on that is both depressing and disheartening. While I am glad they don’t promise compensation (because when you are depressed, the last thing you need is yet another empty promise) I’m ever so slightly annoyed they loosely promise it.

For any of us who know anything about Depression, we know we don’t bother setting ourselves up for any chance of disappointment. We don’t look at the word ‘possible’ as a positive possibility; we actually see it as a glaring negative reinforcing our ‘Why Bother?’ platform.

For the depressed person, life is one gigantic disappointment stepping on the face of mini disappointments. It is easier to stay in a state of sadness rather than attempt anything or risk the set-up and inevitable fall.

Sadness is sad. Sadness is gloomy. Sadness is depressing and ugly but one thing it doesn’t seem to be is very hard. Remember when they would try to tell you in school that it takes more muscles to frown than to smile? What a gigantic crock. I mean, it’s made enough impact to stick with me, but the reason it’s not applicable to a depressed person is because contrary to popular belief, we aren’t sitting around frowning. We just aren’t smiling. If you stay in a state of perpetual sadness, you aren’t doing anything really. You may be way past the point of crying, screaming and well on your way to being numb. Being numb requires almost no emotion. It’s pretty easy really.

What we don’t understand is that Depression is a war waging on the inside. Stomach acid from anxiety eats away at more organs than we know. Inactivity affects many parts of our body. The bigger problem is we have to actually care in order to turn it around and when the ‘Why Bother’ phrase is front and center, ‘possible compensation’ isn’t going to trigger much of a reaction.

So, I have very little confidence that this clinical trial will do much to help. If they actually knew enough about Depression to hold a study, they would have known the phrasing isn’t going to do much at all.

Getting out of Depression requires a series of steps which are often different for each individual and I think one of the common threads between depressed people is the fear of disappointment. ‘Why Bother?’ means just that. If we think nothing good can come of something, we don’t try anything. In some cases we don’t have the serotonin to get up in front of the decision.

My initial question, ‘Is Sadness better than Disappointment?’ is a question I asked because I had a solid answer during my Depression. It wasn’t yes and it wasn’t no. The answer was, ‘Who cares?’ I sometimes would mix it up by answering, ‘Oh, I’m sorry…were you talking to me?’ it reminds me of Robert Downey Jr in Tropic Thunder where he says, ‘Were you talking this whole time?’

It’s almost impossible to answer any question if you don’t care. Think of how many times your spouse or partner has asked you a question where you didn’t care. They want a Yes or No, so you throw them the one which will satisfy them the most so you can go back to not caring. You want to get back to not caring as quickly as possible because it’s simply easier.

For me, sadness was actually the step right before not caring. I needed help from my Doctor (which I mentioned in previous blogs) to start caring again and then I had years where I pulled myself back up to caring again. Once I could care again, I could answer the question, but not before.

Sadness was way better than Disappointment. Disappointment didn’t make me sad, it made me sick. I had such a record-breaking number of frustrations in my life that I chose to not try anything. The way our bodies are made up, we have to actual do stuff to function. We have to try things to learn. We need to risk some areas to succeed in other areas.

The word ‘risk’ is very scary to a sad person. It’s better to pay $800 a month of your crappy apartment than risk setting up a mortgage where your payments could be the same. It’s similar with Depression where it’s not as bad as we think. The difference is we don’t want the responsibility, because we simply can’t take the risk, invisible, inflated or otherwise. It could make us sick.

Life happens in steps and stages. That is all we have to do at any one time. Once I figured out that my body wasn’t caring because it had some chemical issues inhibiting it from caring, I could start my journey back to trying out the possibilities again in life.

Of course life can be unnerving, sucky, unpredictable and unfair. But nobody promised it would be anything else.

If you too are afraid of taking a risk, maybe try a teaspoon of risk over a full cup. We don’t have to turn it all around today. We can give ourselves the permission to take it in Baby Steps.

If you haven’t seen the movie ‘What About Bob?’ you should really rent it. It’s funny and really valid in so many ways.

Baby steps to the door,

Karen :)

“...baby step onto the elevator... baby step into the elevator... I'm *in* the elevator.” ~Bill Murray in ‘What About Bob?’

When Devastation Strikes

Devastation is a really hard word that I don’t think should be applied to too many personal things BUT IT IS! If you research the history of the word, it was usually used when talking about weather disasters or in war. Some of the synonyms are destruction, desolation and wreckage.

I have personally used the word when referring to my own break-ups, deaths around me or upheavals in my world. But in hindsight, while I was feeling especially devastated as though an elephant sat directly in the middle of my chest, it was nothing compared to a village being flattened or some of these national disasters we’ve seen.

Preservation is the opposite of devastation although I don’t feel like the word is useful in present day. Of course prevention is better than trying to fix something after the fact, but our reality has become we all have to fix something that is pure devastation in our world now. Prevention was like some fleeting thought passed across a board room table in yesteryears. Please don’t mistake this as me not being a believer in prevention, I am …but the immediate needs of people are to fix things, to correct the devastation and just get to step one of survival.

But try telling any of that to someone who swears they are devastated. See, today I listened to a girl who said she felt so devastated by a break-up that she wanted to take her own life. I wish I could say this was an isolated incident because it would be nice to chalk that up as nonsense, but the reality is that she was sitting in the middle of her wreckage and felt as though she’d been crushed by a fleet of elephants. Ah see, devastation is in fact relative! To tell her that what she was feeling was not devastation would be diminishing her feelings and really not at all helpful, so suffice to say I left my history lesson off the table. :) I do however, hate to hear anyone crippled by their emotion because it soaks up valuable time where they can be out there being creative or building a cool life!

The one common thing that a person who is emotionally devastated will feel which is in alignment with the historical definition of devastation is the sense of loss, the overwhelming lack of direction, the crippling sense of numbness and quite often the talk of taking one’s own life. For these reasons and many others, I find people likening their break-ups to disasters because all the symptoms creep in.

So in all cases of devastation, how does a person even begin to take step number one to come up from the ashes? That is a novel of an answer, in fact it could be a whole library of afterthought along with it. In my own instances, all I could do is something called a reality check.

In every case where I have felt devastated whether real or imagined (very real to me in any case) was to ask myself "what just happened?" Before getting a grip on how to fix it, I sorta had to know what was broken. My mind is the Queen of Imagination. This works well for me sometimes and other times it’s an alternate reality I have made up.

Break-ups have always seemed like the death of me because I always invest more than my heart could take on. So, in the case of break-ups, I had to ask myself if that other person was really MY WHOLE WORLD like the love songs suggest, or if they were perhaps just a person along my path at that time, at that place in my life. Then I could really ask myself, is this devastation or really just a crappy hurdle?

In looking back it was a hurdle, nothing more. At the time, I was crushed.

My reality check when I lost my mother was the worst hurdle in my life because I considered her to be my whole world. But here is where I may come off insensitive but I don’t mean to be. My Mother’s death hurt like nothing I could ever have imagined, but the lesson I learned was that she left a piece of her with me to move on and do things…to involve myself in the bigger picture and seek out my purpose here. I am certainly very sad about it and felt instantly devastated, but I had to zoom out and find my reality check. The reality was I had a FANTASTIC Mom like no other and I was blessed. The reality was that I was going to move on. The reality was this was something I was going to turn into art. My reality check is how I began to heal.

When devastation strikes, we all feel like we cannot go on. But suicide will devastate someone else and the reality of life is none of us are free from feeling devastation and I find great comfort in knowing it’s not just me.

If you feel the need to take your own life over something you have found devastating to you, I encourage you to seek out like-minded people and there are MANY of us who maybe don’t know exactly what you are feeling, but together we are all coming together to find our reality check in it all.

This life can throw many curveballs at us and can suck so badly in so many ways, but I have crawled out of what has felt like devastation and I am finding a beautiful world out there with cool spirits and green fields. It’s not all bad like the news suggests and it’s not as devastating as our love songs try to infer.

It may feel bad right now, but we are given a day at a time with sleep in between. I personally never thought I’d be here to make new friends because I have attempted it. Nobody could convince me at the time that I was going to make it through. But here I am feeling like a kid again. At times, I really can’t believe it!

Much love on you…we’re all in it together…and you are NOT alone!
Karen :)

"All the world is full of suffering. It is also full of overcoming." ~Helen Keller

Is your life a Horror Movie?

I remember sitting in a room with a bunch of other rape and incest survivors. I didn’t want to be there, but you are told that by talking to other people with similar experiences that you can begin to heal or at least you don’t feel quite so alone in what happened to you.

I spent most of those meetings staring at the large clock on the wall hoping I could leave soon. These people didn’t know what I had been through. What I felt was true suffering compared to these dumb little stories was a mismatch of souls put together by some pitifully-run charitable organization and I didn’t think it was working. I basically left every meeting feeling like these people tripped and scraped their knee and I was beaten in a dark alley.

I’ve had similar experiences throughout my life where I felt very condescending towards others thinking their version of a bad life was whiny and pathetic. This was before the internet.

I have since heard stories from people younger, my age and older that make my alley-style life look like a knee scrape. The stories from some people who have come here from other countries make my jaw drop. What’s the lesson in it all? There is always someone who has it worse off than you.

This shouldn’t lessen our own pain, though. Just yesterday I spoke with someone who I think came the closest to having it exactly like me. Their story pretty much mirrored mine. I wouldn’t say really any worse or any better (even though if looked at under a magnifying glass, there would be a difference I’m sure) and it dawned on me that since we all get to talk on a network with millions of people in a world with billions of people we can now find people who we relate to. We see it in music, in films and in the arts. If you like any genre of music, you will find others who like it too. If you like horror films, you will find others who enjoy them. There seems to be a huge selection of like-minded people out there to pick the brains of and find comfort in their numbers.

When I do find the people with parallel lives, I am both thrilled and saddened. Those of us who seem to be healing from our bad past have done the same thing; made lemonade out of lemons (ya, I stretched my tired lil brain this morning for an alternate cliché, but that’s what we are going with) The thing about the music we love and the films we watch is that although they are mostly fictional, the best artists and filmmakers all understand the experience. It’s awful to think a person running away from a screaming chainsaw on the big screen is based off someone, somewhere in real life being chased, but it reaches into the heart of victims everywhere. Yes, you could leave the film feeling worse than when you came, but you could also walk away feeling pretty good about your history …and present life…not having it so bad.

So, if your life has felt like a horror movie, have you ever thought of writing one? Maybe your life hasn’t been quite that colorful, but you know others would benefit from reading about it.

For me personally, I initially do music to get things off my chest with not a lot of consideration for what others will think, but it’s been a tremendous blessing in my life to hear that what I am doing is positively affecting those who have also had a personal hell to deal with. I never imagined that any good could ever have come from those experiences. It turns out no matter how crazy our story is or how seemingly bland our existence is, there are others who are in our same boat. If I could go thousands of miles above earth and rearrange everyone into groups that were better matched, I would. If it was as simple as placing everyone like pins on a map, we’d all find more comfort.

For all its flaws, the internet is not only exposing sadness that needs attention, but its giving those who are hurting the opportunity to find groups who are like them.

And for those of you who write, paint, make music or films; your story can transform into a beautiful butterfly with potential to heal others. May I humbly encourage you to look for the good in your scenario…the hope in your world and the art in your sadness. As ugly as it is now, roses can grow from the ashes.

Now, if that isn’t the cheesiest thing you’ve ever heard; go grab your day!

ROCK ON my friends,

Karen :)

"Happiness is a direction, not a place." ~Sydney J. Harris